Hi all,I guess I have become spoiled. See, I have been using Linux now for several years. In the beginning I had a piece of crap sound card that barely managed to work. It was labeled as unsupported and I could only get 8 bit sound out of it after using isapnptools and claiming it as an SB. I was happy to get it to work at all because it was one of those "If it works for you count yourself very lucky" kind of things.
I had no expectations of ever getting the on-board sound to work under linux when I first bought my VIA motherboard with 8233A sound card. The only scenario where it works for me is with a 2.4.22 kernel and ALSA 0.9.0rc6. I was quite surprised when it did.
Later, I bought a real SB16 and used it for a few years until ISA was unavailable (sad too, it was one of the ones with the built in amp).
So I had to buy a new soundcard. I bought a piece of crap for $15 and ran lspci to find that it was a maestro, which is listed as supported with OSS and worked flawlessly. Once I saw that it was supported I had no doubt that it would work.
Now I have this via8233/A, which is listed as working...but doesn't. I am dissapointed because it is one of those "Works, use driver XXX and run XXX" kind of things. Once I saw that it was supported I had no doubt that it would work.... oops...
See, when something has a version number of 1, I have a reasonable expectation that it works. When it is incorperated into the kernel and is threatening to become the new thing, I expect it to work as advertized. When my soundcard is listed as supported, I really expect that it works. I have never, in all these years, run into a situation like this - especially with regard to the kernel itself. It really surprises me that ALSA was accepted into the kernel.
Now I am left looking into buying a new soundcard. This is not something I did not expect might have to happen. However, I certainly can't look at the ALSA driver list to find out what to buy! Maybe it worked once upon a time, but does it still? If it works today, will it tomarro? This is not something I am used to.
So, I am still hoping that developers are not to quick to switch to ALSA. When someone can look at the alsa site, read the instructions for the card they have, and get something that functions at the end...then, and only then, should developers think of switching. Instead what is there is a site that gives directions for the soundcard, but when you follow them it doesn't work. Then when you read the forum entries below you see that it broke some time back with one of the releases and nobody ever fixed it or even labeled it as broken.
NR
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